


Be All My Sins Remebered

by SuchStuffAsDreamsAreMadeOn



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: AU, Angst, Blood, But really pretty PG, Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Lots of it, Mentions of Blood, Mentions of alcohol, Mentions of death/killing, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Probably the closest I'll ever come, Smut, Some very light descriptions of sex, Sort of? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 13:47:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16641321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuchStuffAsDreamsAreMadeOn/pseuds/SuchStuffAsDreamsAreMadeOn
Summary: "The Princess’s bullet is in Gleb’s gun now, but it is years and miles and stolen moments on the streets of Leningrad too late.The Princess’s bullet is in his gun, and the Princess is in his bed."Gleb realizes who the street sweeper he met on the streets of Leningrad really is and he realizes that this information may have come too late.





	Be All My Sins Remebered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wolvesandgirls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolvesandgirls/gifts).



> This work was inspired by [this](http://wearesuchstuff1.tumblr.com/post/177550949993/igetoffmylawn-glamoramamama75-bcollis-the) photo, and was written for the lovely [Ashlei](https://wolves-girls.tumblr.com/), who has encouraged me to keep writing and to stay sane, even when I feel I can do neither.
> 
> The title of the work comes from _Hamlet_.

Gleb slams another shot glass onto the table. 

There are seven glasses on the table. They had all started full.

Seven glasses and one chair.

Another drink goes down, clear and sharp - a slap in the face he has decided he deserves. He ignores the way his hand shakes as this empty glass joins the others.

He had squeezed a trigger with those hands - squeezed a trigger on a gun his father had handed him when he was nine. The gun had been his father's, as had been the hands which held Gleb’s steady as he closed one eye and aimed at the bean can sitting on a stump. That bean can had been just as innocent as the children gunned down by the same firearm - and his father’s same pair of hands - years later. Gleb shot it just the same.

He had saluted with those hands - saluted as the red flag marched by, commemorating the freedom of Russia, the naming of Leningrad, the death of a family. Gleb had been sure, so sure, that the promise of the Bolsheviks had been worth the death, the screams in the night, and his father’s hollow eyes. Part of him wishes he was still so sure.

He had reached out with those hands - reached out to a frightened girl huddled in the muddy slush on a street in Leningrad, driven to the ground by the sound of a truck backfiring. The sound had rung like gunshots through the girl’s mind, and when Gleb had taken her hand he had found her trembling from more than the Russian cold. Gleb remembers thinking later it was odd, since the heat from the girl’s hand had stayed imprinted on his skin the rest of the day. 

Gleb can still feel her handprints across his body, roaming over his chest, his neck, his arms. He can feel her heat and feel her shuddering body beneath his.

He downs another shot.

Six empty, one full, the clear vodka taunting him. Russian roulette, with every chamber filled but one - the bullet for a princess, huddled in a cellar, her family’s cold, lifeless bodies seeping blood onto the stones around her. That Princess’s bullet is in Gleb’s gun now, but it is years and miles and stolen moments on the streets of Leningrad too late.

The Princess’s bullet is in his gun, and the Princess is in his bed.

The air was cold - it’s Russia, after all - and her slight frame had sought his, the fire she lit in him warming her, even as more and more of her skin was exposed. Her soft form arching and gasping beneath him, Gleb allowed his hands to gently explore a body he knew had been abused for so long. He just hadn’t known how badly.

She had chosen him, trusted him. He had found her waiting for him outside his office building, snow in her uncovered hair, her lips blue and her hands icy white. Shrugging off his overcoat, Gleb had draped it around her, steering her through the streets of Leningrad towards the safety and warmth of his apartment. Even now Gleb cannot feel the cold.

After guiding her to his bedroom he had turned away, meaning to leave her to warm herself and dry her clothes at the heater, but her hand in his and her quite word - stay - stopped him. He hesitated, terrified to hurt her, terrified that somehow she had decided that this was the price for warmth and tea and friendship.

_Anya._

Voice low, her name tentative and pained. Despite his hesitation Gleb let her pull him close, and when she breathed into his neck - _please, stay_ \- his fingers found her waist and her lips found his and there was no more thought of price, only need. 

He pulled back from her only once, when her first startled gasp - somewhere between a groan and a cry - sent the ice of the frozen Neva through his veins, but Anya held him still and in a moment her belly relaxed beneath him and her skin on his drew him back to her. Airy moans had filled his ears, her heaving breath tingling on his neck. He had held her in his arms until she stopped shaking and it was only after - when she had slipped into sleep and Gleb’s hand had roamed thoughtlessly over her skin, exploring the swell of her breasts and the flat expanse of her exposed stomach - that he had found the scars marring her body. Gleb knew enough about bayonet and bullet wounds, even in the dark, to be sure of what he’d never wanted to believe could be true.

A scream fractures the silence of the night like the glass in the window Gleb had vaguely considered punching when he’d come downstairs. The sound, full of terror and pain and heartbreak, hangs in the air for a moment, only to be followed by another pitiful, sobbing cry. Gleb knows where the sound comes from - the bedroom just above him is the only other room in the apartment - but Gleb finds himself paralyzed, unable to move. 

He should go wake her - the neighbors will complain; the Cheka will be called. 

He should go comfort her - seek to wipe away the sins of his father, whose actions he knows, even if the girl in his bed does not, has caused these screams. 

He should go kill her - put the last bullet in her head and down the last shot, sitting mockingly on the table in front of him, on his way out to alert the Bolsheviks. 

Gleb can do none of these things. He cannot move from his seat. Instead, he runs his hands through his hair, gripping tightly, his elbows braced on the table in front of him, his shoulders heaving with labored breath. He can only wait for the sounds of Anya’s pain to stop.

Of course Gleb had known that she had nightmares. The evidence of them is written across her face in the dark circles under her eyes. Sometimes, although very rarely, when the night had been too bad or the day had been too cold and she had sought him out - whether from desperation or loneliness he was never quite sure - she would tell him about them. Her words would spill out quietly. She would admit to little - the Red Army uniform, he could always tell, in the back of her mind - but over cups of tea or during afternoons huddled around the little stove in Gleb’s office or in the small, stolen moments in the side alleys of Leningrad, Anya had given Gleb glimpses of bullets, smoke, and guns, and images her waking mind could not - or perhaps chose not - to remember.

Gleb had known Anya had nightmares but now, listening to the horrors caused by his father and the other guards at the Ipatiev House shrieked into the night by the girl he had held in his arms not an hour ago, Gleb found he could not draw the line between dream and reality, Anya’s nightmares and his sins. 

The sins of the father… the sins of the son.

He’d heard the shots. He’d heard the screams. And the ones coming from his bed were exactly the same.

It is his name that wakes her and breaks him. The final, tearfully cry morphs into the word, shouted as though he would be able to help her, then disappears with a gasp and the noise of his thin mattress squeaking as Anya sits up suddenly, pulled from her dream by her own terror. This is the last sound Gleb hears before glass shatters on the floor around him. 

With sudden movement Gleb sweeps his hand across the table in front of him, sending the glasses flying, only for them to smash against the floor and wall, the last of the seven spilling its liquid along the surface before joining its broken family.

The table is next, Gleb upending it with a furry, sending it crashing to its side.

Then the chair, smashed first against the wall, again and again and again, then finally tossed away to join the table.

His breath his coming hard and there is a warm wetness running along his palm. Glancing down, Gleb sees red flowing. He must have cut his hand on the glasses as they fractured against the table. As he watches, blood drips off his fingers to mix with the vodka and shards. He heaves a breath, then another, then turns, whether to find the first aid kit or another object to throw he’s not entirely sure. 

His feet stop when he sees her, standing halfway down the steps. She had pulled on her shift before leaving the bedroom and now stands, pale skin and white cloth - the ghost of a princess who should, by all rights, be dead.

_Nymph, in thy orisons, be all my sins remembered._

Glass crunching underfoot, Gleb crosses numbly to the bottom of the stairs, drawn to her without thought. Descending the last few steps to meet him, Anya stops so that, despite her small height, she and Gleb stand practically eye to eye.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t reach out to him, just waits, watching him with her brows pulled slightly together; concerned, as if he was the one who woke screaming in the night, whose family had been murdered for political power. He cannot bear to meet her eyes.

“Gleb?” Her voice is soft and measured.

His knees hit the ground almost before he realizes what he is doing. He is closer to her now, and when he bows his neck his forehead rests gently against Anya’s lower belly. Gleb can feel her breath and he knows, even if she does not, that this may very well be the closest he will ever come to bowing to royalty. 

He has hurt her. His father hurt her. This nameless girl, whose name he knows, whose name he should shout from the rooftops until every last Cheka in the city hears him.

Then her hand in is his hair, fingertips raking gently along his scalp, and when he allows his eyes to close, head still pressed to the tender softness of her body, he knows he cannot shout her name from the rooftops.

Gleb doesn’t even know if he can whisper her name to the nameless girl herself.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for taking the time to read! I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> I would love to hear your thoughts, so please, leave a comment!
> 
> Or
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr at [wearesuchstuff1](http://wearesuchstuff1.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Please note - I do not own Anastasia!


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